A group of 20 people held candles and walked in a silent line from the Wescoat Pavilion to the Bushyhead Memorial and back at Trail of Tears State Park Saturday night.
They were remembering an event on a similarly blustery December day more than 150 years ago when 9,000 American Indians walked through the area on a forced relocation march.
The 800-mile journey resulting in the death of more than 4,000 Cherokees is what gives the park its name.
April Rhodes of Jackson, a member of the Western Cherokee of Arkansas and Louisiana Territories, participated. She believes that her great-great-grandmother was on the trail and sneaked away to hide in the hills, eventually having children with white settlers.
"I'm a mixed-blood," she said.
Saturday she wore a traditional dress and handed out an item called cornbeads. The seeds are said to have been dropped along the trail. Where they fell, legend has it, cornlike stalks shot up and shed their own tears in the form of the small gray seeds.
Rhodes hopes the event reminds people of what she believes is a largely neglected history.
"It's important that people learn the truth, not just all the sweet, sweet stories like Princess Otahki," she said of the fabled Cherokee woman who died here and has since been discovered to be Nancy Bushyhead.
"It's very tough, but what's even more sad is that more of our people aren't out here. I know it's cold, but this is important."
Rhodes wants to know more about her ancestry, but has found it difficult to do research.
"People then shied away from the white man's records, so it's nearly impossible to find things like birth certificates."
Rhodes hopes to spark interest for a younger generation. She introduced a Trail of Tears patch for her daughter's Girl Scout troop which they can only earn by completing events designed to teach the history of the march. Still, she worries about what the future holds.
"It's like we don't exist anymore," she said.
Another walker was Paul White Eagle, chief of the AhNiYvWiYa tribe, which numbers about 200 and has tribal lands in Grassy, Mo. Their name means "the human people."
White Eagle's people, he said, split off from the Cherokee in Missouri and did not complete the walk on the trail. They hid in swamplands near Dexter for years performing traditional religious ceremonies at night. They only officially came out of hiding in the 1990s.
"When the swamps were drained, we mostly became sharecroppers, but we kept holding the nightly ceremonies," he said.
"We were secretive because we had no freedom of religion. What we were doing was illegal," he said.
White Eagle said there are only perhaps a few more than two dozen people who speak the AhNiYvWiYa language, but there are classes every Sunday teaching young people of the tribe how to speak it.
"We are making sure it's not going to be lost," he said.
Another participant and co-organizer, Paul White, completed an important ritual for the walk.
"The tradition on this walk is for someone to dip their hand or foot in the Mississippi River," said White. "So I took care of everyone here today. I dipped my foot in because I'm not wearing any gloves."
White, a semiretired college teacher who has mixed-blood Cherokee ancestry, said remembering the trail is crucial.
"This was a holocaust committed against native peoples. It is just like the Jewish holocaust, except it took place right here in America."
tgreaney@semissourian.com
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